Transmeta's New Smaller, Faster Chips Announced 235
billstewart writes "Transmeta announced their new 5900 and 5700 CPUs. They're 50% smaller than the 5800, intended for low-power, low-heat, high-speed applications, and contain an integrated Northbridge. They're sampling now, production in January 2004, and expect to have a mini-ITX board out in 1Q04. The core chip is a 128-bit VLIW hidden by x86 emulation (as opposed to their new Efficeon, which is 256-bit VLIW.) The difference between the 5900 and 5700 seems to be L2 cache size.
There are several other stories on Google News."
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, that's good news (Score:2, Interesting)
Wanted (Score:5, Interesting)
how about (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:here's what the chips are used for: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Care? (Score:5, Interesting)
Transmeta rocks. (Score:5, Interesting)
Their CPUs are sufficient for most tasks and not seldom run three to four times as long as comparable CPUs with the same amount of power. They are the equivalent to the 'kaizend' motors in the late generation portable cassette players ('walkmen'), seriously optimized for a specific goal: to consume as much minimum power as possible.
My friend has a Fujitsu Lifebook P with a 900 Mhz transmeta and it runs 16 hrs of the grid! And he even watches DVDs with it. Try that with a Pentium Mobile.
Re:I thought Transmeta was already dead (Score:5, Interesting)
i hope that these new chips fit in the old slots. it would be a nice upgrade for my laptop......
Re:I thought Transmeta was already dead (Score:2, Interesting)
Game performance? (Score:5, Interesting)
But I have friends who do LAN parties, and I've wondered about getting a Shuttle kind of machine, or preferably something the size of a Cappachino computer. Small, slip it into a backpack, show up with just that and a flat screen (keyboard, mouse, etc) - but it would be a small machine just for PC LAN gaming. It wouldn't need a huge video card - anything that can run most games published 2003 at 800x600 would be fine.
I wonder if these Transmeta chips could be used this way.
Re:Care? (Score:3, Interesting)
Could a low end Intel-based system do it? Maybe, but I'm actually interested in a lower power system more than initial cost.
Reason behind the model numbering scheme (Score:3, Interesting)
"The Crusoe TM5700/TM5900 processors are another significant step in advancing the cause of efficient computing," said Dr. Matthew R. Perry, president and CEO of Transmeta. "By delivering a solution that is 50 percent smaller than our existing Crusoe TM5800 processors, Transmeta allows system designers to further leverage the high performance and low-heat dissipation characteristics of Transmeta's proven hardware and software architecture for a wide range of new smaller form factor, fan-less designs."
Important tidbit not in the article, but needed to be:
Dr. Perry then proceeded to explain the seemingly confusing numbering scheme, "Well, since we had cut down the form factor some of thought we should also cut the model number down. But, we didn't want to alienate those who are used to seeing newer products with higher model numbers, so we compromised and named it higher and lower than its predecessor."
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Transmeta vs VIA C3?? (Score:5, Interesting)
VIA has been doing a very nice job with the C3, with several varieties, speeds, and sizes to be used in all sorts of commercial or hobbyist applications. They have a new mini-itx board, with dual ethernet ports for network gateway usage. And, their new C3 processor includes hardware AES support, with incredible performance for network or filesystem encryption.
It would be great to have an alternative. The TM chips seem to have some really interesting features. But, I have not seen any of these boards/chips available retail. They seem to be essentially OEM solutions for embedded devices. This positioning puts them head to head with many excellent non-x86 solutions, like the ARM, PowerPC, and Hitachi SH processors.
Re:It's hard to get excited. (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine having a cheap, low power, fanless, quiet computer, running a variety of convenient things for a home network. You know, DNS, HTTP caching, file serving, email, the works. Put this in a small and attractive case, pop in a processor that really is quite fast, and you have something worth drooling over.
Re:I thought Transmeta was already dead (Score:3, Interesting)
a) Transmeta's biggest problem is the lack of speed. It runs most productivity software and normal browsing (not Mozilla - Opera and IE are fine) at comfortable speeds. Don't try to run it as a J2EE server or something like that, though.
b) Transmeta's biggest advantage is the battery life. As another poster mentioned, I regularly get 10 hours from my battery, and that's *real life*, not some artificial benchmark.
In sum, it's the best laptop chip ever if you don't have more than moderate speed needs. Perfect for the casual user - and for people doing lightweight HTML/CSS development, like me.
Re:It's hard to get excited. (Score:4, Interesting)
Give me that socket sucking power of my P4 any day.
Does anyone else feel that we are pass due for another speed revolution?"
No. In fact we have been long overdue for a plateau (relatively) such as we are in now. It has allowed alternatives to Intel to be taken seriously
More importantly, the current stall in processors speeds will mostly likely lead to more efficient software, particularly from Microsoft, who tends to rely on Intel's huge speed jumps to justify more bloated version of Windows (not that I use it).
Finally, it's hard to find a PC these days with no moving parts (fans) and I've decided, if at all possible all my future PCs will be either fanless or at least passively cooled under normal use conditions. I don't like the noise, the added RF interference, or the ultimate need for repair when the fan bearings wear out. (Yeah, I know disk drives have moving parts, but they are generally easier to replace, and I think solid state disks are a ways off yet).
Re:Transmeta in Laptops (Score:4, Interesting)
Just leave work at work and enjoy doing outside things outside.
no?
Sharp has the first Efficeon equipped notebook (Score:2, Interesting)
Ubiq Computing from Akiba Hotline wrote a review on the Sharp PC-MM2-5NE a couple days ago (unfortunately in japanese ):
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2003/1209/ho
(use a translator service e.g. world.altavista.net or any others)
Some notes from the review:
They used a PowerPoint 2002 file at 4.02MB and timed opening times
Model 1st time 2nd time 3rd time
Efficeon 28.04 18.95 18.78
TM8600 1GHz
(PC-MM2-5NE)
Crusoe 51.91 29.44 29.78
TM5800 1GHz
(PC-MM1-H5W)
Full starting time with the MM2: 43.70 seconds
With the MM1 (Crusoe): 58.25 seconds
(I'm assuming this is Windows XP Home with nothing tweaked, and the same application setup - it would be silly to compare startup times with different application suites in start-up.)
The 256MB on board appears to be a permanent fixture and not upgradable, in the goal of making the MM2 as light as possible.
The hard drive model is a Hitachi (HGST) DK14FA-20; 20GB, 1.8".
That "MOBILE switch" I mentioned earlier, according to the review, can increase the battery time up to 40%. It would be interesting to see actual numbers with this (40%? that's a lot).
The keyboard is 17mm pitch, 1.7mm stroke. Compare this to the P-2k series with 17mm pitch and 2mm key stroke. This means the Sharp keyboard will be shallower. The LCD doesn't have a latch, so I assume it'll be like the P-5k and Sony models with a spring-loaded screen.
At a brightness level 3 (whatever that is) and using both Office XP (whichever apps, I don't know) and Netscape Communicator (and "etc." - whatever that means!) - the review managed to get 2.4 hours off the standard battery. The standard battery is 19.98Wh with 11.1V/1.8A. They mentioned in passing that the Sony 505 Extreme (X505) got 2.8 hours, but that's not a good comparison since that battery is 22.2Wh. The Sharp model is also much cheaper than the Sony.
They also have an MPEG movie, but my download was corrupted or something (though I suspect it's some kind of powerpoint presentation in Japanese so we wouldn't be able to understand anyway).
Another thing - the TM8600 supports AGP4x, but the AGP operates at 2x on the Sharp with ATI mobility radeon; the article cites Transmeta as saying that the AGP bus with Efficeon isn't entirely stable. I'm not sure what to make of this, but surely it'll be better than the video in the P-2k.
Cutting-edge desktops? (Score:4, Interesting)
The only problem being the fact that they could never sell it... only high-end server versions of Windows support high numbers of SMP CPUs. Obviously this isn't a problem for Linux users.
Their past can haunt them (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm surprised transmeta lasted this long and so I guess that's an indicator that they weren't dot com vaporware. However, I hope to see this time they try to market them not as laptop replacements but just really fast chips for embeded applications or portable devices. Battery life is a very big consideration in designing mp3 players, cell phones, cameras, etc. What this may bring soon is smaller devices that rely on less chips since they can take advantage of transmetas more powerful chip than what it's replacing. If not, it could simply allow more features in handhelds that already exist instead of trying to invent new markets (tablet's to some extent).
Re:Transmeta vs VIA C3?? (Score:3, Interesting)
More interestingly, how does it compare to their new C5I/Esther processor expected out in Q1/04? The Esther core is 90nm, is supposed to run at 2GHz, 5W max or something, with 70x the RNG speed of the Nehemiah core, and integrated SHA hashing in addition to AES. Yay for SSL with 2% processor load!
After all, if we're looking at future chips...
Never be slashdotted again! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd love to see someone put 8 of these on a board with a gig of memory, and two ethernet jacks. One would go to the network, the other would go to your file server/SAN/NAS/other_buzzword.
Put 2 gigs of memory on it for disk caching, and for a pretty low amount of money and electrical power, you could dish out VERY large numbers of web pages.
Shoot, take it farther: Have another unit based on them that runs LVS as a load-balancer, and put several of the servers behind it. All of the sudden, for $2000, you'd have the capability to dish out a billion web pages per day (or more), with load-balancing and realtime failover to boot!
steve
Re:Hooray! (Score:3, Interesting)
Tom
Re:Transmeta in Laptops (Score:3, Interesting)
I love to code at coffeeshops, and in fact, took a year's sabbatical where I did most of my coding in coffeeshops. In the four years of owning this computer (it shipped with win98), only once did I ever run down the batteries. Eight hours of coding and I was pretty beat - six hours of creative thought was all I was good for at a time. I hope you can survive to 12, but you might want to try it before buy a machine to that spec.
(p.s. I love that machine, but it was too heavy for anything but a backpack)
other architectures than x86? (Score:5, Interesting)
it's the manufacturing, stupid (Score:2, Interesting)
First, Ditzel wanted to do a fast VLIW--the great wide hope--faster than Intel. It didn't quite work out but someone at Transmeta lucked into the low power idea. Great idea. It took awhile but with enough perserverance and capital they made it work.
But at the end of the day, they get to compete with Intel. This is sort of like winning a bunch of thumb-wrestling contests and, as first prize, getting to go a few rounds with Mike Tyson. Intel doesn't play nice, has a multiple ear appetite, *deep* pockets and can out-manufacture anyone.
I wish I could buy a Crusoe; I really think as an idea it rocks. But life has slapped enough sense into me to be skeptical. They have less than a year of money left. But someone, AMD?, will buy them.
Ditzel reminds me of the bad guys in Bond movies. Instead of killing Bond when they have a chance, they have to tie him up with a beautiful girl and leave the room. Ditzel lacks execution skills.
Re:Never be slashdotted again! (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought that one of Transmeta's selling points was the the chips were relatively inexpensive, compared to the AMD/Intel chips, but I could be wrong. The chips probably use much less power mostly because they likely have far fewer transistors than a P4, Athlon, or Opteron. It still may be more than $2,000, but it would still likely be MUCH cheaper (say, an order of magnitude) than trying to do it by building a bunch of Intel/AMD machines. (more below)
I mentioned a billion-page per day number simply because so many people's web servers seem to buckle under a slashdotting load of tens or hundreds of thousands of hits per *hour*.
I'm guessing that it would probably be able to hit the million-per-minute mark with fewer processers, as these sound to be significantly better performers than StrongARMs.
(more info on doing it with Intel/AMD machines: I use 7 dual-CPU front-end machines for handling the Perl CGI and dishing out HTTP/HTTPS for my office. They'll handle ten million hits per day with relative ease. (actually, they'd handle MUCH more if it were static HTML, a lot of the CGI work is pretty intensive) However, it's expensive. 7 good-quality rack-mount chassis' don't come cheap. 7 motherboards, 7 hard drives, having 7 sets of memory. And the memory is mostly for disk cache, so I'm duplicating the cache on each one. By combining a good number of these inexpensive chips on a well-designed motherboard, you'd save the cost of 6 chassis, 6 motherboards, 6 sets of RAM, 6 disks, etc.. That's several thousand in savings right there.)
steve